The fall of the intellectual

Postmodern society has a surfeit of analysts and an impoverishment of artists.

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first, the Orwellian culture becomes a prison. In the second, the Huxleyan culture becomes a burlesque.

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countena

Plato feared the power of entertainment, the power of the senses to overthrow the mind, the power of emotion to obliterate reason. No admirer of popular democracy, Plato said that the enlightened or elite had a duty to educate those bewitched by the shadows on the cave wall, a position that led Socrates to quip: “As for the man who tried to free th

It is hard not to feel as though a tremendous devolution has taken place between that Golden Age and our own comparatively leaden one. People used to labor to furnish their minds. They invested in the acquisition of memories the same way we invest in the acquisition of things. But today, beyond the Oxford examination hall’s oaken doors, the vast ma